Private Property and Capitalism: the Awakening of a Force

Abstract

The article seeks to bring a map of ideas about private property as a functional legal archetype to a capitalist system, in which the production and transaction of goods towards their most economical use is only possible to the extent that the goods are assigned exclusively and excluding to a single owner. In this sense, the fundamental lines of the construction of the proprietary system that consolidates liberal modernity are investigated, as a force that reacts to medieval conceptions about the appropriation and use of goods. This route of ideas is drawn upon the map of the evolution of capitalism as a form of social and economic organization, which responds to political and ideological forces that explain the persistence of private property as the only way of relating people and goods. This paradigm can be challenged from new forms of production and exchange, which will lay the foundations for new forms of appropriation.